We are a group of like minded individuals, including experienced campaigners, who refuse to allow Big Energy companies like SSEN to destroy our communities and environment. They only consider their shareholders, including BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, not us.

We will not negotiate with SSEN or accept the movement of their industrial hardware from one area at the expense of another. We don’t want an industrial menacing metallic spider's web spreading over the Highlands.

We will ask the pertinent questions and employ the professionals we need to fight this. We will demand evidence: the facts and figures, that these upgrades are even necessary. And IF they can prove they are, we will tell SSEN to go back to the drawing board and dismiss the cheapest most damaging option they have currently put forward. It is not our job to give them more acceptable alternatives and instead of relying on 100 year old overhead line technology they should update their proposals to something more acceptable to the environment and communities.

We will also be speaking to independent engineers who will scrutinise whatever SSEN tell us.

Rural communities and our countryside  across the UK are being sacrificed for profit by our own governments. We are not alone, and our voices are becoming louder. We can help each other and share information.

In England a review has now (March 2023) been ordered for the transmission proposals across Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk.

‘Electricity System Operator (ESO) has said there will be an independent review, to consider offshore routes. The review, expected to be published in the summer, will identify alternative options, assess the benefits and costs of each option and benchmark costs of each proposal against other British projects’.

National Grid ESO in 2020 said: an integrated offshore grid for the East of England would cost only £5.263billion while the piecemeal and pylons would cost £7.52billion

Over £2.2billion saved by taking it offshore!

Visit campaign group www.pylonseastanglia.co.uk and their Facebook page, Essex Suffolk Norfolk Pylons to read more.

In one of their recent posts regarding a BBC Countryfile programme the president of UK Transmission at the National Grid and responsible for the network in England and Wales stated that: 

1. The starting presumption was always for overhead lines, and

2. They were only consulting within the scope of the ‘corridor’ put forward in proposals. Ie., they were not looking at or consulting on any other routes at all.

It will be the same here - See video.

When the Beauly to Denny was first proposed communities were told that to underground it would cost 15 – 26% more than overhead lines.

As it happened the £300m estimate for overhead power soared to almost £900m. If underground cable had have been used, millions could have been saved and the visual impact could have been minimised.

Click here to read the Press & Journal article.

We would invite anyone who wants to see what environmental vandalism by pylons and overhead lines actually look like in reality to come and look at the Beauly to Denny line. Remember too that the pylons we are being faced with now are almost twice the size.

Take a look while you are in Beauly at the Balblair 42 acre ‘substation’ site, subject until recently, to a noise abatement notice, because of the infamous ‘Beauly Buzz.’ The former small inoffensive hydro switching station has been added to over the years until it now resembles a sprawling mass of industrial kit, spilling towards residences and cutting into forest and agricultural land. This is what happens when an energy giant lands in your rural community and gets a foothold. This is the result of ‘negotiations’ with SSEN. 

The pylons we are now being faced with are around 60 meters tall. The proposed new substation at Fanellan, initially over 60 acres, the equivalent to about 35 professional football pitches, has now been increased to 868 acres, the size of Glasgow Prestwick airport, right in the middle of communities where people live and work, with homes, businesses, agriculture, woodlands and wildlife.

If this goes ahead, we will NEVER stop fighting to protect our environment. We know from previous battles that once an area is trashed by corporate greed, ever increasing expansion is the modus operandi.

We know that there are developers waiting in the wings, rubbing their hands with glee, for a connection to hook up even more unnecessary wind turbines. It will be a relentless onslaught just as it was when the Beauly to Denny line was approved.

We are fighting for ourselves, our families, our health, our homes, the environment and wildlife that is so precious to us. We are literally fighting for our lives and the natural world around us.

This is a mammoth task. To do all this we will have to fund raise and ask for volunteers to help in any way they can. Any money raised on this site will go into a fund that will help raise awareness and fight SSEN’s proposals. The money donated will not be used for protecting individual properties or asking SSEN to move pylons to where they will impact others instead. We will be guided by the experts we employ as to where this money will be best spent to stop SSEN e.g., what application is fought and how. Our bank balance can never compete with a multinational so we so we need your support.

An official letter from our group has been sent to Ofgem and SSEN demanding transparency, that the public are not faced with multiple applications and that a maximum one application is submitted for each of the three lines and their infra structure – pylons, lines, substations, converters and battery storage facilities.

That is the Spittal to Beauly; Beauly to Peterhead; Western Isles to Beauly.

Our goal is to stop the transmission lines and make the rest of the proposed industrial installations to be connected to them redundant. To do that we expect to concentrate on the Beauly area where all the lines converge. 

We have launched an advertising campaign with banners, posters, flyers and social media to raise public awareness across the Highlands.

We are aiming to get SSEN’s devastating plans go before the public so they can be scrutinised and officials cross examined. We will need to keep donations coming in to have a chance of being successful. Without enough funds to employ the professionals we need we are simply lay people fighting rich, powerful, multinationals that certainly don’t have the best interests of our communities or environment at heart.

As a campaign group we can only do so much over such a large area, so if you object to this development, please make your voice heard. If you don’t object, SSEN and Scottish Government will assume you support what is happening.

Please click here to see what you can do to help and spread the word.

The sad truth is these new transmission lines are to encourage more onshore wind turbines that we do not need. This is not on orders from Westminster but to satisfy the Scottish government’s own onshore wind targets. This was confirmed to CB4PC by Ofgem themselves at a meeting in December 2023, organised by Deputy First Minister, Kate Forbes. The Scottish government holds the power, through 100% devolved planning, to stop our rural environment being industrialized by multinationals but they don’t. Why not?

There is already an eye watering constraints bill on our energy bills that pays wind operators to stop generating into the grid when demand is low.

At 23rd May 2024 we had paid almost £1.75billion for wind turbines to do nothing. Click here for details.

With every wind development approved this figure can only rocket further because whatever we do in Scotland there is still a bottleneck at the border and the grid in England cannot take all the wind power Scotland generates. There are no guarantees that they will ever take all what we produce as they are following their own intensive energy producing program including offshore and onshore wind, nuclear and subsea to Morocco.

It has been reported that wind operators are getting paid constraints (at least as much as if they were generating into the grid) and putting the electricity into battery storage. They will then sell that same electricity back to the grid in times of low wind and high demand – effectively getting paid twice.

No wonder we are seeing such an insane rush for battery storage across rural Scotland.

All these costs are loaded onto the bills of every UK consumer and it has to stop! We cannot afford to further enrich these already wealthy companies any more.

We will post information on the updates page and send out newsletters when needed to those who sign up to them on this website.

If you are affected by these monstrous proposals by SSEN then please join us. We all need each other. We need to stand together to be heard. 

WE ARE NOT AN INDUSTRIAL ‘HUB’ AND REFUSE TO BECOME ONE